Grazed from NetworkWorld.  Author: Sevcik and Wetzel.

The term Intercloud describes the future interconnectedness–or federation–of clouds, similar to the network of networks that is today’s Internet. Like the electrical grid, in which a utility is shared based on supply and demand, the Intercloud will be a mesh of cloud computing resources owned by many, and interconnected and shared via open standards.

Economic forces are propelling cloud service providers toward peering arrangements that presage cloud federation. Federation allows cloud providers to buy external resources when demand exceeds supply, and to rent resources when fellow providers need help meeting demand. It also allows providers to offer service outside their footprint without deploying computing resources in every nook and cranny of the world. Sharing resources among providers is especially compelling for smaller service providers because it enables them compete on a more even footing with Goliaths like Amazon’s EC2…

Grazed from MedCity.  Author: Shahid Shah.

Last year I started a series of ’Do’s and Dont’s’ in hospital tech by focusing on wireless technologies.

Folks asked a lot of questions about do’s and dont’s in other tech areas so here’s a list of more tips and tricks:

• Do start implementing cloud-based services. Don’t think, though, that just because you are implementing cloud services that you will have less infrastructure or related work to do. Cloud services, especially in the SaaS realm, are ’application-centric’ solutions and as such the infrastructure requirements remain pretty substantial ’ especially the sophistication of the network infrastructure…

Grazed from Computerworld.  Author: James Niccolai.

Acer kicked off the Consumer Electronics Show on Sunday by previewing a free cloud service for storing images and other documents online, and showing a novel ultrabook that hides its I/O ports in a hidden pop-up section at the back.

The cloud service, called AcerCloud, will allow people to upload all their images, video and documents to an online service hosted by Acer, and access them over the Web from any PC, mobile phone or tablet running Windows or Android. That includes devices from other vendors…

Grazed from MarketWatch.  Author: PR Announcement.

Lenovo, the world’s number two PC company, is flexing its innovation muscle at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show and beyond, to create a seamless digital experience for its customers across multiple devices, be it PCs, tablets, smartphones or Smart TVs. Lenovo recently unveiled its "Personal Cloud" vision, marking the transformation of the company from a "personal computer" manufacturer to a "personal cloud solution" provider that integrates hardware, software and cloud computing together. The Company’s direction is evident in a variety of new products, including the IdeaTab S2, Smartphone S2 and K91 smart TV…

Grazed from PRNewsWire.  Author: PR Announcement.

iCloudDrive for Business; Performance Edge of a Networked Company through Added Flexibility and Mobility at Affordable Price Points

There are a number of different ways that cloud computing can drive business value. In addition to lowering the cost of IT, cloud can help provide access to new markets and enable new business models. Cloud service provider iCloud Inc. brings a value proposition to SMBs by providing a service that has the potential to transform business strategy in the following ways:

Increasing business responsiveness with mobility providing connect anywhere flexibility and real-time access to all your data and information sharing without device or location constraints…

Grazed from GigaOM.  Author: James Urquhart.

If you are looking to cloud computing to simplify your IT environment, I’m afraid I have bad news for you.

Yeah, you might find yourself having to worry less about infrastructure, less about how storage systems work or what networking to use to connect a virtualized resource pool, or even what middleware settings are optimal for your applications. However, for every problem eliminated by choosing cloud, you’ll find it just creates more of the problems you remain accountable for—and may even create some new problems that you never had to face before.

Which is as it should be. Let me explain…

Grazed from WBJournal.com.  Author: Peter Marsh.

The past year saw an overwhelming adoption of cloud computing, software-as-a-service (SaaS) and hosted applications, as many businesses chose to store their data online rather than on physical computers and servers. A new report from Cisco estimates that cloud computing usage is expected to grow twelvefold by 2015, But an increasing number of local companies are finding that simply having the cloud in their business isn’t enough; it’s how quickly and reliably they can access that cloud (and the applications in it) that will determine their success in 2012.

Businesses are also finding that the cloud helps reduce energy consumption and offers them the flexibility to purchase more data storage for only as long as they need it, rather than being forced to invest in costly office equipment that takes years to pay off…

Grazed from Sys Con Media.  Author: Bob Gourley.

Rackspace is a growing cloud computing capability provider that differentiates themselves by what they call “Fanatical Support.”  We try not to dwell too long on the marketing slogans of firms but have first-hand experience with Rackspace and can tell you their support is really really different. It must be the culture, but every support experience has left me convinced they are a great company to do business with.

We host several sites at Rackspace, including CTOvision.com  We also host data in Rackspace’s clouds and use their Cloud Files as part of a content delivery system. Additionally we use Rackspace cloud servers for standing up testing and prototyping environments and have also stood up Hadoop analytical clusters in the Rackspace cloud…

Grazed from CTOVision.com.  Author: Bob Gourley.

Amazon didn’t invent cloud computing, but they deserve lots of credit for transforming the business model for providing cloud services through elastic computing (for some history see Jeff Bezos’ Risky Bet from Businessweek Nov 2006). They have pushed the economics of cloud computing to be so efficient they are able to offer a 12 months worth of initial compute for free. This is a great opportunity to learn their interface and to test how their computing capabilities might serve your needs.

We have been using Amazon servers for a variety of purposes over the years and have just finished fielding a CDH3 cluster standup there and thought it would be a good time to capture some quickstart lessons to help you get started with your own systems (we have a similar post for Rackspace cloud servers here)…

Grazed from Datacenter Dynamics.  Author:  Yevgeniy Sverdlik.

The US Army has awarded a US$250m contract to four companies to build a cloud environment that will reside in both traditional and mobile data centers. MicroTech – one of the awardees – says this is the army’s first cloud computing contract.

MicroTech says it will provide, maintain and support mobile data centers for the Army Private Cloud Mobile (name of the future environment). Services will include providing application hosting in containerized data centers, application migration, as well as cloud services such as Infrastructure- , Platform- and Software-as-a-Service.